AUSTRALIA
Second missing hiker found
A second person missing in the outback for two weeks after going hiking has been found near Alice Springs, police said yesterday. Phu Tran, 40, was found by a farmer at a cattle station near Alice Springs. He survived soaring temperatures by drinking water meant for livestock, and was basically in good condition, although slightly disoriented, police said. Tran was found three days after his friend Tamra McBeath-Riley was found. The third member of the group, Claire Hockridge, is still missing.
SRI LANKA
Parliament suspension set
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has suspended parliament for a month ahead of snap elections he wants to call in March to consolidate his landslide victory in last month’s presidential elections. He issued a proclamation overnight proroguing the legislature and said a new session would begin from Jan. 3. The official announcement of a fresh session of the legislature will give his minority government more control over parliamentary oversight committees.
JAPAN
Nuisance calls bring arrest
A pensioner has been arrested after ringing a telephone company 24,000 times to complain they had violated his contract, Tokyo police and media reported yesterday. Akitoshi Okamoto, 71, was taken into custody last week after he made hundreds of toll-free calls over eight days to KDDI’s customer service section. However, media outlets reported that he made thousands more calls from public pay phones to voice his displeasure with the company and insult customer service staff. He has been arrested on suspicion of “fraudulent obstruction of business,” a police spokesman said.
INDIA
NASA spots crashed lander
NASA has found the Vikram lander that crashed in September while attempting to land near the moon’s south pole. The agency released images showing an impact site and debris from the lander, which disappeared with a rover minutes before a scheduled touchdown that would have made the country just the fourth nation to achieve a soft landing on the moon. Local mechanical engineer Shanmuga Subramanian contacted NASA after studying images of the site released by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team on Sept. 26. He identified the debris and the team confirmed the finding after checking images acquired in the following months, NASA said.
ZIMBABWE
WFP sending food aid
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) yesterday announced it was procuring 240,000 tonnes of food assistance to deliver to 4.1 million people in the nation, where food shortages are being exacerbated by runaway inflation and drought induced by climate change. “We are very much concerned as the situation continues to deteriorate,” WFP country director Eddie Rowe said in Harare. “We believe if we do not reach out and assist these people then the situation would blow up into a major crisis.”
ZIMBABWE
Mugabe’s estate listed
Former president Robert Mugabe left behind US$10 million in the bank and four houses in the capital, but there is no will naming his beneficiaries, a list of his estate published by state-owned Herald newspaper showed yesterday. The list included a farm, 10 cars and 11 hectares of land and the orchard where he is buried, but does not mention any overseas assets.
RUSSIA
Blogger registration passed
President Vladimir Putin yesterday signed a bill into law that gives the government the right to register bloggers, journalists and social media users as foreign agents. The law can apply to anyone who distributes content produced by media firms registered as foreign agents and receives payments from abroad. Individuals registered as foreign agents will be subject to additional government scrutiny.
RUSSIA
Murder charge recommended
Investigators yesterday said that two sisters who killed their father after years of abuse should face murder charges. Three sisters — Krestina, Angelina and Maria Khachaturyan — stabbed their father, Mikhail, to death in July last year after years of alleged beatings and sexual assault. They were 17, 18 and 19 at the time of the killing. The Investigate Committee said in a statement that it was recommending charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder against the two older sisters, Krestina and Angelina. The probe pointed to “mitigating circumstances,” but said the two older sisters were of sound mind and aware of their actions at the time of the attack. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Investigators recommended that the youngest sister, Maria, should enter mandatory psychiatric care.
UNITED STATES
Word of year announced
Climate change, gun violence, the very nature of democracy and an angsty little movie star called Forky helped propel “existential” to Dictionary.com’s word of the year. “In our data, it speaks to this sense of grappling with our survival, both literally and figuratively, that defined so much of the discourse,” John Kelly, senior research editor for the site, said on Monday. The word earned awareness in searches on the Web site in the aftermath of wildfires and Hurricane Dorian, and mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. It also reared itself in presidential politics and pop culture, including Forky the white plastic spork in Toy Story 4. Oxford Dictionaries picked “climate emergency” as its word of the year.
UNITED STATES
PG&E blamed for fire
California power producer PG&E Corp did not properly inspect and replace transmission lines before a faulty wire sparked a wildfire that killed more than 80 people last year, a probe by a state regulator has concluded. The Caribou-Palermo transmission line was identified as the cause of the Camp Fire last year, which virtually incinerated the northern town of Paradise and stands as the state’s most lethal blaze. “PG&E failed to maintain an effective inspection and maintenance program to identify and correct hazardous conditions on its transmission lines ... as are necessary to promote the safety and health of its patrons and the public,” a 700-page report by the California Public Utilities Commission said.
FRANCE
Drone postal deliveries start
La Poste’s subsidiary DPD has begun using drones to make parcel deliveries to a remote Alpine village. DPD says flying packages by remote control is more reliable, quicker and safer than driving a van up narrow mountain roads in winter when they are often icy or blocked by snow. Launched during a normal postal delivery round, drones are guided to a “secure terminal” near the village where they release the package to be collected by the customer using a code.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not